On 18 June 2024 the U.S. Marshals stopped a man on a Washington, D.C. sidewalk. He had gone out for a coffee. Twenty-three years earlier, on 2 May 2001, Leslie Preer was beaten and strangled in the front hall of her own house on Drummond Avenue in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Her husband, Sandy, sat through two police interviews and a polygraph, and for the next twenty-three years the police believed he did it. In 2022 the Montgomery County cold case unit sent the skin cells found under Leslie's fingernails to a genealogy laboratory in Texas. The tree it built led to a Romanian family line, then to a surname that had been sitting in the file since a neighbour's tip in January 2002: her daughter's high-school boyfriend. In June 2024 detectives followed him through Dulles airport and collected the water bottle he threw away. It matched. This is the full record, in order: the 911 call from 2001, Sandy Preer's interrogation that same evening, the daughter's 2002 interview, the brother's 2024 interview, the arrest bodycam, and Eugene Gligor's interrogation at the First District station, where he says the same four words her husband said in the same building twenty-three years before. Eugene Gligor pleaded guilty to second-degree murder on 7 May 2025 and was sentenced on 28 August 2025 to 30 years with all but 22 suspended, plus five years of supervised probation. He has never said why he was in the house. Chapters 0:00 The denial 1:03 The 911 call, 2 May 2001 3:16 The husband, that evening 11:32 The family, a year later 14:46 The family tree and the water bottle 21:39 The interrogation 41:35 The sentence Sources: Montgomery County Police Department release, 18 June 2024 · FOX 5 DC · WUSA9 · WJLA · NBC4 · The Washington Post · ABC News · WTOP · Bethesda Magazine. All interrogation, interview, 911 and bodycam recordings are the real releases, used for commentary and reporting. Some scene-setting shots are licensed stock or illustrative reconstructions; no face on screen is generated. The Denial Tapes: every interrogation, in order. Subscribe for the next tape.

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